Reactors : 2% Drop Rate at end of mission is indecent for something with random rolls.

[(PSN)guzmantt1977]

1 hour ago, MadMattPrime said:

That is on Paper for fck's sake.

 

If we simulate the perfect 100 run farm based on Flexa - Veil Proxima drop table.

 

Veil/Flexa (Skirmish)
400 Dirac	Uncommon (20.00%)
1000 Dirac	Uncommon (10.00%)
3X Riven Sliver	Rare (5.00%)
Forma Blueprint	Rare (2.50%)
Lavan Engines Mk Iii	Rare (2.00%)
Lavan Reactor Mk Iii	Rare (2.00%)
Lavan Shield Array Mk Iii	Rare (2.00%)
Vidar Engines Mk Iii	Rare (2.00%)
Vidar Reactor Mk Iii	Rare (2.00%)
Vidar Shield Array Mk Iii	Rare (2.00%)
Neo T2 Relic	Rare (7.22%)
Neo A3 Relic	Rare (7.22%)
Neo Z5 Relic	Rare (7.22%)
Neo M2 Relic	Rare (7.22%)
Neo I1 Relic	Rare (7.22%)
Neo R3 Relic	Rare (7.22%)
Neo G2 Relic	Rare (7.21%)

 

At THE END PERFECT 100 Results are:

Veil/Flexa (Skirmish)
400 Dirac	20
1000 Dirac	10
3X Riven Sliver	5
Forma Blueprint	2.5
Lavan Engines Mk Iii	2
Lavan Reactor Mk Iii	2
Lavan Shield Array Mk Iii	2
Vidar Engines Mk Iii	2
Vidar Reactor Mk Iii	2
Vidar Shield Array Mk Iii	2
Neo T2 Relic	7.22
Neo A3 Relic	7.22
Neo Z5 Relic	7.22
Neo M2 Relic	7.22
Neo I1 Relic	7.22
Neo R3 Relic	7.22
Neo G2 Relic	7.21

THAT IS THE DREAM PERFECT RNG FARM

But because we are subjected to RNG each person's results may differ.

Person A after 100 runs can get this 

Veil/Flexa (Skirmish)
400 Dirac	25
1000 Dirac	5
3X Riven Sliver	5
Forma Blueprint	2.5
Lavan Engines Mk Iii	2
Lavan Reactor Mk Iii	2
Lavan Shield Array Mk Iii	2
Vidar Engines Mk Iii	2
Vidar Reactor Mk Iii	1
Vidar Shield Array Mk Iii	2
Neo T2 Relic	8.22
Neo A3 Relic	7.22
Neo Z5 Relic	7.22
Neo M2 Relic	7.22
Neo I1 Relic	7.22
Neo R3 Relic	7.22
Neo G2 Relic	7.21

 

While the WORST RNG PLAYER can get this as a possibe reward table after 100 runs (Highly Unlikely PUT STILL POSSIBLE)

Veil/Flexa (Skirmish)
400 Dirac	100
1000 Dirac	0
3X Riven Sliver	0
Forma Blueprint	0
Lavan Engines Mk Iii	0
Lavan Reactor Mk Iii	0
Lavan Shield Array Mk Iii	0
Vidar Engines Mk Iii	0
Vidar Reactor Mk Iii	0
Vidar Shield Array Mk Iii	0
Neo T2 Relic	0
Neo A3 Relic	0
Neo Z5 Relic	0
Neo M2 Relic	0
Neo I1 Relic	0
Neo R3 Relic	0
Neo G2 Relic	0

 

The likelyhood of a person getting the damn REACTOR is LESSER THAN 2%.

STATISTICALLY we have a less 2% chance of getting the damn reactor.

You forgot that it is also possible to get a hundred runs that are like this:

Vidar Reactor Mk iii 100

Everything else 0

 So by your logic it has a ridiculously high chance of dropping! Way more than 2 percent!!! Or... You know... It all balances out because that's how RNG works. Go speak to your high school math teacher before you end up hurting yourself. 

[schilds]

We can actually calculate the expected distribution of a specific drop across the entire population (in this case, a binomial distribution).

100 runs of a 2% chance drop looks like this:

This may be interpreted as a graph of the expected fraction of people (vertical axis) who will get the drop some number of times (horiziontal axis).

i.e. we can expect that (roughly eyeballing the graph), if everyone does 100 missions:

~12% of people will get 0 of the drop

~27% of people will get 1 of the drop

~27% of people will get 2 of the drop

~19% of people will get 3 of the drop

~9% of people will get 4 of the drop

~3% of people will get 5 of the drop

~1% of people will get 6 of the drop

and so on.

The average will be 2 (as you would expect).

 

Also, here's a graph for the percentage of people (vertical axis) who will have gotten at least one Vidar Reactor after some number of runs (horizontal axis).

The red line is for any Mk3 Vidar Reactor.

The blue line is for a Mk3 Vidar Reactor equal to or better than a Mk3 Sigma.

The green line is for a reactor with 90+ avionics capacity.

 

50% of the playerbase can expect to see a better than Sigma reactor within about 50 missions.  

10% of the playerbase can expect to take ~150+ missions for a better than Sigma reactor. That's more than 3x the effort, or 100+ extra missions.

 

50% of the playerbase can expect to see a 90+ reactor within about 240 missions.

10% of the playerbase (click here for whole graph) can expect to take 800+ missions. Again, 3x the effort, or 560+ extra missions for a similar reward.

 

Is such a large variation in effort for similar reward a good idea?

Does the grind match the replayability of the game mode? That is, is there a hundred to almost a thousand missions of replayability in Empyrean?

This shows the extent of the disconect between effort and reward, or replayability and grind, when you have rng like this.

 

The rewards with these kinds of drop rates are not just cosmetic rewards. Some of them are rewards that can mean the difference between 6 minute missions and 30 minute missions. This is not just DE inflicting pain on their players, it's DE inflicting pain on themselves. Imagine trying to simultaneously satisfy a playerbase with such large variations in luck/reward (we're not talking a few percentages here, but hundreds) on top of already large differences in skill and time. It's like they're designing their game to make it as difficult for as possible for themselves to (a) balance and (b) keep everyone happy.

Edited January 9, 2020 by schilds

[Exodess]

2 hours ago, schilds said:

The rewards with these kinds of drop rates are not just cosmetic rewards. Some of them are rewards that can mean the difference between 6 minute missions and 30 minute missions. This is not just DE inflicting pain on their players, it's DE inflicting pain on themselves. Imagine trying to simultaneously satisfy a playerbase with such large variations in luck/reward (we're not talking a few percentages here, but hundreds) on top of already large differences in skill and time. It's like they're designing their game to make it as difficult for as possible for themselves to (a) balance and (b) keep everyone happy.

I am deeply appreciative of and applaud your in-depth math analysis, and you make a solid point.

Edited January 9, 2020 by Exodess

[Skaleek]

@schilds above and beyond yet again.

[(PSN)guzmantt1977]

9 hours ago, schilds said:

50% of the playerbase can expect to see a better than Sigma reactor within about 50 missions.  

*Thinking back* Yeah that sounds about right. 

9 hours ago, schilds said:

50% of the playerbase can expect to see a 90+ reactor within about 240 missions.

Woo hoo, so since I'm in the 50% I should only have about 150 more runs. Good thing I got that better than Sigma Reactor!

(I'm kidding, I know that's not how this works.) 

9 hours ago, schilds said:

The rewards with these kinds of drop rates are not just cosmetic rewards. Some of them are rewards that can mean the difference between 6 minute missions and 30 minute missions. This is not just DE inflicting pain on their players, it's DE inflicting pain on themselves. Imagine trying to simultaneously satisfy a playerbase with such large variations in luck/reward (we're not talking a few percentages here, but hundreds) on top of already large differences in skill and time. It's like they're designing their game to make it as difficult for as possible for themselves to (a) balance and (b) keep everyone happy.

I suspect that they're going to make some adjustments, not just to the drop chance, but to how it can be obtained. It's in line with what I have seen them do with several of the harder to obtain items. 

[Steel_Rook]

11 hours ago, schilds said:

The rewards with these kinds of drop rates are not just cosmetic rewards. Some of them are rewards that can mean the difference between 6 minute missions and 30 minute missions. This is not just DE inflicting pain on their players, it's DE inflicting pain on themselves. Imagine trying to simultaneously satisfy a playerbase with such large variations in luck/reward (we're not talking a few percentages here, but hundreds) on top of already large differences in skill and time. It's like they're designing their game to make it as difficult for as possible for themselves to (a) balance and (b) keep everyone happy.

As I've said in the past - the worst thing a developer can do to themselves is create a massive power gap between a majority of players in the community. The wider the power gap, the smaller the chunk of players who will ever be happy with a single piece of content will be. I know I bring up City of Heroes a lot, but learning from that game's (many, MANY) mistakes can be educational. In early alpha development, that game allowed heroes (player characters) to pick abilities pretty much at will, via a points-buy system. This allowed some players to min-max the hell out of their characters and break combat completely, while others who picked what looked cool (say, flight, teleportation, invulnerability) could end up with almost entirely inert characters who couldn't do anything. Balancing content proved so difficult that developer Cryptic Studios dumped their ENTIRE character build system and went with an "Archetypes" design instead. That way, players could only pick from two lists of ability packs (primary and secondary) with ability selection and character-wide modifiers determined by a predefined class. Yes, that meant a lot less variety, but it excised all the dysfunctional underpowered AND broken overpowered builds, leaving everyone on roughly equal footing and thus much more likely to find content sorta-equally challenging.

DE are fond of doing this to themselves, and have done it many, many times before. Arcanes are a prime example. Arcane Guardian + Arcane Grace is honestly a broken combo. It might not be great for ALL Warframes, but it's damn powerful on most of them and offers an experience so far removed from people just starting the game and using no Arcanes that it may as well be a completely different game. And yet said Arcanes are some of the rarer and - crucially - monetarily expensive ones. So you end up with a minority of people who spent hours grinding for Arcanes, a minority of people with poor financial sense (like me) shelling out 1700 Plat for Arcanes, and a majority of people with few if any Arcanes whatsoever. Ain't no content going to work for all of us, because I'm taking a fraction of the damage and healing off of being hit before I even put my hands on the controls. The same with Adaptation, the same with "god roll" Rivens and so on. I suspect DE believe that they can use these massively overpowered rewards as "incentive" in order to get people grinding their asses off, but still keep them "rare" enough through low drop rates that they can close their eyes and pretend there isn't a balance problem.

All of that is to say that I don't think DE balanced around us having 100 Avionics capacity. I think they balanced around the Sigma reactor and just threw the others out as a kind of "Ooh! You could hit the jackpot!" reward that they don't want us to have in large numbers. And if these were cosmetic rewards I might be OK with that. As you said, however, Reactors in particular are a VERY important - I dare say CENTRAL - aspect of our Railjacks. Making those into fractal RNG ensures a majority of player feeling bad for being unable to get them AND feeling bad for the perception of not being competitive without them. I remain of the opinion that Mod Capacity should NEVER EVER be random. I don't like random stats in general, but I can live with most everything else. Mod Capacity needs to be fixed, however. Fixed to the reactor, upgradable through some other, DETERMINISTIC system. Of all the things DE could make random, this one should never be up for consideration.

[(PSN)Stealth_Cobra]

Curious the opinion of people on this now that we basically have 4% chance instead of 2% (On PS4, so I haven't experienced the new drops myself). Did it fix the issue or are you just getting more frequent crappy unusable reactors ?

Edited January 13, 2020 by (PS4)Stealth_Cobra

[(PSN)guzmantt1977]

4 minutes ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

Did it fix the issue or are you just getting more frequent crappy unusable reactors ?

Pretty sure that the answer to this question is "yes". 

[Arkraty]

I played all night for a vidar reactor today and yesterday.... NOTHING and already had 4 vidars with 33 - 30 - 59 and the last one 61... TIRED 

[(PSN)Stealth_Cobra]

Yeah, I know that feel. I'm 9999 in intrinsics using very littlle ivara stealth farm and i've completed probably like 700-1000 veil missions , yet i've only dropped 6 vidar reactors, with only one above 50 (a measly 58). At this point I don't even believe I'll ever get a decent reactor anymore. Maybe once the PS4 patch drops... I ponder every day when I log into the game why I even bother running those veil missions ,as I know very well i'm gonna get relics I don't need, diracs when I already have 100000 stored and nothing to upgrade and when I do get one of those rare vidar or lavan components, it's going to be worse than the zekti stuff I have repaired already.

The fact I'm probably going to hit 10-10-10-10 before I get a decent reactor tells you alot about that farm and how unrewarding it all is. Nothing drains your hype about a gamemode than running the same missions over and over and not getting that one item you need fit a full build on your railjack.

At the very least there should be a way to reroll our existing reactors with diracs, even if it costs like 5k diracs each time. PLEASE DE... We've wasted enough of our lives on this. Free us from this farm ! There's more than enough stuff to farm in RJ without needing the reactor farm (farming for avionics, for ressources to craft parts now that there's no rush repair drones, farming for intrinsics to reach 9999, farming from absolute perfect rolls on all guns and parts).

Edited January 14, 2020 by (PS4)Stealth_Cobra

[(PSN)vinster]

5 minutes ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

Yeah, I know that feel. I'm 9999 in intrinsics using very littlle ivara stealth farm and i've completed probably like 700-1000 veil missions , yet i've only dropped 6 vidar reactors, with only one above 50 (a measly 58). At this point I don't even believe I'll ever get a decent reactor. Maybe once the PS4 patch drops... I ponder every day when I log into the game why I even bother running those veil missions ,as I know very well i'm gonna get relics, diracs and when I do get one of those rare vidar or lavan components, it's going to be worse than the zekti stuff I have repaired already.

The fact I'm probably going to hit 10-10-10-10 before I get a decent reactor tells you alot about that farm and how unrewarding it all is.

OMG, I feel for you.  I can't image running that many veil mission and be disappointed each time.

But like you the only vidar mk3 reactors I got gave me 39, 58 and 59 avionics cap after many runs too.  The lavan mk3 reactor I got a couple of nights before gave me 63, so that's the highest I've got since RJ dropped on PS4.

Some of my clan/alliance mates got 80+/90+ on their first or second vidar reactor so go figure!

Our next patch should give us a 4% vidar/lavan reactor drop rates but even that won't fixed the broken mess of bulls#it that is reactor stat rng.  DE once and for all, can you please fix this or allow some sort of reactor capacity upgrade increase through honest play?  From the grind that Stealth_Cobra already endured, I say he deserves a 100 cap vidar reactor!

[Skaleek]

My tenth vidar reactor was a 98/90. I still think that this is a difficult grind gating a lot of power beholden to RNG. I burned out finishing my vidar reactor and still have to do my vidar engines (effectively the same grind). To be honest the tenebrous ephemera grind was worse, but i may have gotten lucky on the vidar reactor. Tying capacity to RNG is a huge mistake imo. Flux capacity is fine because it barely makes a difference. Just like +46% fire rate vs +58% fire rate. Not a huge difference. But 46 capacity vs 58 capacity? Thats a whole avionic which could equal to +90% turret damage or whatever.

Edited January 14, 2020 by Skaleek

[Skaleek]

On 2020-01-09 at 9:05 AM, Steel_Rook said:

Arcane Guardian + Arcane Grace is honestly a broken combo. It might not be great for ALL Warframes

There is no warframe that I do not equip at least one arcane guardian on. It's too good not to equip. Arcane guardian's strength level blows away even that of energize and grace, in my opinion.

Edited January 14, 2020 by Skaleek

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, Skaleek said:

There is no warframe that I do not equip at least one arcane guardian on. It's too good not to equip. Arcane guardian's strength level blows away even that of energize and grace, in my opinion.

I've tried some combination of Arcane Barrier + Arcane Grace, chiefly on Hyldrin due to her shield-gating and massive amount of shields. She's about the only Warframe I've managed to make that work on, however, mostly because I can re-trip my shields back to full before the Shield Gate invulnerability period ends. Or did I do Arcane Guardian/Acrane Barrier. I'd have to look. But yes, I agree with you. I have that combo + Adaptation on just about all of my Warframes now.

[Skaleek]

Just now, Steel_Rook said:

I've tried some combination of Arcane Barrier + Arcane Grace, chiefly on Hyldrin due to her shield-gating and massive amount of shields. She's about the only Warframe I've managed to make that work on

You bastard. You managed to think of the one Warframe where my statement does not hold true!!!! I didnt even think of Hildryn. Yeah I use 2 arcane barrier on her. Damnit, you got me.

[Alpha56]

I just did one rail jack mission during 2 days (Giant Point).

First day i had a 93 90, and the second one i had a 94 80.

I guess i just won against the RNG.

[Steel_Rook]

14 hours ago, Skaleek said:

You bastard. You managed to think of the one Warframe where my statement does not hold true!!!! I didnt even think of Hildryn. Yeah I use 2 arcane barrier on her. Damnit, you got me.

Sorry 🙂 Yeah, the only reason this works on Hyldrin is Shield Gating. I might have used two Arcane Barriers on her, but I... Don't have two of them and I didn't fancy plonking down another 500 Plat. Your point stands, I was more offering that as a musing aside.